He tipped a leering wink to the crowd.

The two men edged together, their arms bent in defensive, one clenched fist held menacingly before them. Sally tried to take her eyes away, but a morbid fascination held them. The antic.i.p.ation of that first blow dragged her as the butcher drags his sheep to the shambles. Every glance she stole in their direction was reluctant; but all power of volition seemed to have left her. The sight of those two half-stripped bodies, gleaming in the gas-light, had concentrated in her eyes. At that moment they filled, obsessed her vision.

"There's not much style about them," muttered Traill. He was leaning far out now, his elbows on the window-sill, his hands supporting his face--the att.i.tude of concentrated interest. "You'll see, they'll go on dancing round each other like this for the whole of the first round. Just what I said--j.a.panese dancing mice."

So they sidled, ridiculous to see, had it not been in such vivid earnest. Now one feinted a blow, then the next. At each lurching attempt Sally caught the breath in her throat. It freed itself automatically with the lack of tension.

At last in a moment of over-balance--a blow from one of them that struck air and pitched the striker forward--they rushed together, each grunting like swine as the breath was driven out of them. Sally clutched the curtain at her side. Her fingers tore at the fabric.

"Break away, break away!" called the master; and when neither of them loosed his hold for fear the other would strike, he took him whom they called Jim by the shoulder and pushed him bodily backwards. The other followed him with a blow like the arm of a windmill in a gale.

Traill chuckled with delight between his hands.

"Time!" called the master, and Jim, striking a futile blow that glanced harmlessly off the shoulder of his opponent, at which the little ring sent up its t.i.tter of laughter, they returned to their attendants.

Traill looked round. "What I said, you see," he remarked; "not one blow went home in the first round. Yet they're fanning them with towels--ridiculous, isn't it?" In the excitement of his interest, he spoke to her as though she were as well acquainted with the manners of the ring as he.

Once more they were called into the open. Once more they slouched forward with the advice that their backers had poured into their ears still gyrating in a wild confusion in their minds. That one minute had seemed interminable to Sally; yet she realized how small a speck of time it must have appeared to them.

"Do you think they'll hit each other this time?" she whispered.

"Well, let's hope so," said Traill. "It's pretty dull as it is.

There isn't much sport in this sort of thing if you can't hit straight.

Oh, one of them'll land a blow presently. They want warming, that's all."

His words sounded far away but absolutely distinct. She scarcely recognized in them the man whom she had been talking to but half an hour before. His whole expression of speech was different. The l.u.s.t of this spirit of animalism was uppermost. He was a different being; yet still she clung to him. "There's a beast in every man, thank G.o.d!"

Just those few words chased in circles through her brain. They had meant nothing to her; she had barely understood them before. Now they lived with reality, and so deeply had his influence penetrated into the very heart of her desire, that she knew she would not have had him different.

Then her eyes dragged back to the scene below her. The men were still sparring; waiting--as Traill had said--for the first falling blow to heat their blood to boiling. At last it fell. Jim Morrison, in a false moment of vantage, rushed in, head down, arms drawn back like the crank shafts of some unresisting engine, ready to deal the crushing body blows. Sally's eyes were wide in a gaping stare. She expected to see the other fall, waited to hear the grunt of the breath as it crushed out of him. But it did not come. She did not try to think how it happened; she only saw Morrison's head shoot upwards from a blow that seemed to rise from the earth. For a moment he poised before his man, head lifted, eyes on the second dazed with the concussion. And then fell Tucker's second blow--the heavy lunge of the body, the thump of the right foot as it came down upon the stroke, and the lightning flash of that bare left arm as it shot through the ugly shadows and found its mark. Sally heard the thud, the void, hollow sound as when the butcher wields his chopper on the naked bone.

She saw one glimpse of the b.l.o.o.d.y face as it fell out of the circle of light into the shadows that hung about the ground, and the little cry that drove its way between her teeth was drowned by Traill's exclamatory delight.

"Good left!" he called out excitedly; "follow it up, man! Follow it up! Don't let him forget it!" Through the fogged haze of sensation, in which for the moment she was almost lost, Sally heard the sudden cessation of voices below. She heard the scurrying of feet and Traill's low chuckle of ironical laughter.

"It's all right!" he called to them. "Go on as far as I'm concerned.

I'm nothing to do with the police. You know your own job better than I do. I don't want to interfere with it. Go on."

The voices commenced their chattering again, through which excitement, like a wandering bee, hummed a moving note.

"You won't make any fuss, will yer, mister?" the master's voice could be heard saying.

"I? Make a fuss? No; why the devil should I? Go on!"

"Third round!" said the master.

Then for a moment Sally's eyes opened. In one of the corners sat Morrison on the knee of an attendant, who was sponging the blood from his face, whilst another flapped a towel before him. She took a deep breath as he rose slowly to his feet and came forward to meet his man. Directly the shuffling sound of feet began again, she closed her eyes once more, holding with fingers numbed and cold to the fringe of the curtain beside her. All the sounds then trooped in pictures before her mind. When she heard the stamp of the foot, the dull slapping thud of the heavy blow, and the moaning rush of breath, she saw that bleeding face falling out of the sickly lamplight into the sooty shadows.

At last she could bear it no longer. Her imagination was gloating in her mind over the horrors that it drew. She forced her eyes to look. It was better to see the worst than conjure still worse terrors in her mind. She let her sight rush to those two half-naked bodies; it sped unerringly to the spot like a filing of iron to the magnet's teeth.

Now Tucker had regained the advantage which that momentary interruption of Traill's had lost him. His man was swaying before him as a sack of sawdust swings inert to the vibrating motion of speed.

His blows were falling short and fast. No great force was behind them.

He had no time to give them force. But they were bewildering--the stones of hail upon the naked eyes. Morrison dropped slowly and slowly backwards, one staggering step at a time; his defenceless arms held feebly like broken straws before his face. From nose to chin, from chin to neck, and from the neck in a spreading stream across his chest, the blood--black in that light--trickled like molten glue.

In his eyes, she could see that questioning glare, the stupid senseless gaze of a man drunk with exhaustion. And still the blows fell to the murmuring accompaniment of that gloating crowd--fell steadily, shortly, tappingly, like the beating of a stick upon dead meat.

"He's got him now, by Jove! he's got him now," she just heard Traill muttering, and then the yellow lamplight slowly went out into the shadows; the deep, black curtain of the sky slowly descended over the whole scene; she felt a cold wind full of moisture fanning gently upon her forehead and her lips; she heard the m.u.f.fled sounds going further and further away as though some great hand were spreading a black velvet cloth over it all; then Traill heard her uncomplaining moan, and felt the dead weight of her senseless body as it lurched against his own.

CHAPTER XVII

There are men of a certain type in this world whose judgment is exceedingly sound when their instincts are not in play, but who, in certain channels, when the senses are at riot, become puerile; the good ship, rudderless, which only rights itself when the storm has pa.s.sed. They are men without the necessary leaven of introspection.

Of themselves, in fact, they know nothing, learn nothing even in the remorse when the deed is done. For first of all, they are men of strength--men who can over-ride, with determination, rough-shod, the hampering results of their follies. Fate and circ.u.mstance have no power over them. They make their own destiny; cutting, if necessary, the knots they have tied, with a knife-edge of will that needs but the one clear sweep to set them free.

Of this type--a vivid example--is Traill. The l.u.s.t of animalism and the determination to possess the woman he once desired, were the two channels, swept into which, he became ungovernable. All clear judgment which he displayed in the management of his work, all foresight which he possessed to a degree in the arrangement of common, mundane affairs, were in such a moment cast out of him. Brute instinct hugged him in its embrace. He lost all sense of honour, who could in other matters be most honourable of all. All sense of pity he left, to become the animal that scents its prey, and stretches limbs, strains heart to reach it. In those moments when the hunger held him, he took the cruelty of the beast into his heart, and drove all else out before it.

When Sally's inert body fell, crushing him against the window recess, he looked down at her white face in the first realization of what he had done. Then he came readily to action; picked her up bodily--a tender, listless weight. In the bend of his arms, he carried her into the other room. An uncushioned settle, no springs, the seat of plain wood, was where he laid her, propping her head, because he knew no better, with a pillow which he brought from the inner room. The sounds from the yard at the back still reached his ears. He strode through to the window and closed it; brought back with him a gla.s.s of water, and stood beside the settle, looking down at the slowly disappearing pallor of her face. Her hat was crushed against the pillow as she lay; he sought with blind and clumsy fingers for the hat pins, extracting them gently, with infinite slowness, as though they were fastened in the flesh. When it was free, he took the hat away and laid it on the table. Then he stood again and watched her. She looked asleep. The loosened hair cl.u.s.tered over her ears--soft silk of gold; his hands touched it. Where a few curls fell out, and the candle-light struck through them, the hair was pale yellow--champagne held up to the sun.

Presently, he picked up her hand, the arm hanging a dead weight from her shoulder, the knuckles touching the floor. His fingers closed over the pulse to find it faintly beating. He had been a fool to let her stand there and watch the fight. He might have known. The thought thrust itself into his mind that he would like to meet the woman who could watch the whole thing out, take the l.u.s.t of it as he did. She might be worth while. But this child--she was nothing more than a child--who fainted at the sight of blood; he felt a tenderness for her. Looking down at her as she lay on the settle before him, he could not conceive himself actually doing her harm. She had called him a gentleman. It seemed as if that stray phrase of hers had taken away all the sting of the desire. She expected him to act as a gentleman; then her expectations should be fulfilled to the letter. The woman who moved him to the deepest force of his nature, was she who knew the brute, not the gentleman in him, and bowed herself in supine submission. And as he stood and watched her there, slowly creeping back through the faintest tinges of colour to consciousness, he little imagined that Sally was the very woman who would so yield herself rather than lose him from her life.

At last she opened her eyes, the dazed, wondering stare that comes after the period of forced unconsciousness.

"Where--where am I?" she whispered.

"Here--my rooms--you fainted."

"Fainted? Why?"

"I don't know;" he knelt down beside her, all tenderness and apology.

"The fight, I suppose; we were looking on at that fight outside, at the back. I never thought--I was a brute--it never entered my head for a moment. Here, take a sip of this water, while I go and get you some brandy."

He put the gla.s.s in her hand, laced her cold fingers round it, and hurried across to a cupboard in one of the oak cabinets. She was sipping the water bravely when he returned. He took the gla.s.s from her, emptied nearly all the contents away into the coal-scuttle--the first receptacle that came to his hand--and poured in the neat spirit.

"Now drink a few sips of this," he said.

She put it to her lips, then lowered her hand again.

"You're really very kind to me," she said in grat.i.tude.

"Kind! Not a bit. Go on--drink it."

She drank a little, obediently, and the points of light came back again into her eyes, the colour burnt once more with a little fevered glow in her cheeks. Then she sat up suddenly with the gla.s.s gripped tightly in her hand.

"Oh, what a fool you must think I am," she exclaimed bitterly, "to make a scene like this, the very first evening that you bring me to your rooms. I am so sorry, so awfully sorry."

He looked at her in wonder. "Great heavens!" he said. "There's nothing to be sorry about. If any one should be sorry, it ought to be myself. I let you in for it. I suppose it is a filthy sight, when you're not accustomed to it."

"Yes, but you must think me so weak. And I'm not weak really; I'm very strong."

He saw part of the pathos of this, but not all of it. He did not realize that she was pleading for herself with all the earnestness of her soul. He had no subtlety of mind, and the fact was too subtle for him to grasp that the whole scene which had taken place with that other woman in his rooms upstairs was being re-enacted, but with a different motive. That woman had fought for his money, his protection for her future. Sally was warring against the frailty of her body for his love. Of his selfishness, she had seen nothing. His cruelty, that she had seen; the beast in the every-man, that she had realized as well.